Michelle My Belle

On 18 Mar, 2008 I uploaded a copy of Michelle Obama's (Michelle LaVaughn Robinson's) undergraduate thesis "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" to my Scribd account here. As anyone who has been a reader for any length of time knows, I like to include the occasional PDF/DOC in my posts and wanted to have this available, should the occasion arise, so I OCRed a photocopy of the original.

That was over a month and a half ago, and I really hadn't given it much thought until last night when I received an email from Scribd saying that they had chosen it as one of their featured documents. Curious, I logged into my Scribd account and was shocked: 24,701 views and an ongoing, spirited and sometimes ugly back and forth in the comments beneath the document. The latest two comments offer a glimpse of the"conversation on race" that this document (and Christopher Hitchens) has provoked:

After reading most of the comments here, I see racism is alive and well! For all of you that use the euphemism of "Affirmative Action" whenever you see a Black person, why not explicitly state you feel Blacks are inferior to whites? Why beat around the bush?
quiznos

Say what you will, I have seen ninth graders write better papers and make fewer grammatical errors. Even the most basic of writing skills seem to have eluded Michelle. Sadly enough, I see that her obsession with her perceived racial inequality has been going on for a long time. She is stewing in that cesspool mentality. What a shame. She needs to stop going to church. She is wasting her time. She does not know the God that would set her free from this mental prison she is living in. I don't believe she will find Him either by listening to J Wright. Who is no Reverend.
yazoo13

I had assumed Michelle Obama's 20yr old thesis would reappear as right-leaning 527's seized upon anything that could be used to impugn the character of Barack Obama vis-à-vis his wife in the general election. With Wright and the democratic front and center, this one appeared to be shelved for the moment. Not so.

Apparently Christopher Hitchens stumbled across the Scribd document and, ever demurring, was compelled to include reference to it in his May 5th Fighting Words Slate opinion piece Are We Getting Two for One? There he chums the waters with the subtly for which he is well known:

"I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

For those unfamiliar with Hitchens, the title of his latest book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything should offer insight into his unabashed embrace of the controversial (on magnificent display here as he debates the existence of God with the right wing lackey and reactionary Dinesh Desouza).

I have long enjoyed both strongly agreeing and disagreeing with Hitchens' views, and reaction to his latest article (and Michelle's Thesis) provides more than a hint of the depth of the well from which controversy springs concerning Obama, his wife, the good Rev. Wright and race in general.

It may or may not be fair, but it appears that Obama, like Sisyphus, is destined to spend the political eternity that is the general election trying to get this boulder to the top of the hill, only to have it roll down upon him again.

Sphere: Related Content